Western banks 'reaping billions from Colombian cocaine trade'

Western banks 'reaping billions from Colombian coc aine trade'

With Britain having overtaken the US and Spain as the world's biggest consumer of coc aine per capita, the Wachovia investigation showed
much of the drug money is also laundered through the City of London, where the principal Wachovia whistleblower, Martin Woods, was based in the bank's
anti-laundering office. He was wrongfully dismissed after sounding the alarm.

Gaviria said: "We know that authorities in the US and UK know far more than they act upon. The authorities realise things about certain people they
think are moving money for the drug trade – but the DEA [US Drugs Enforcement A

I know. Where my daughter lives we can see the dealers on the street. We watch them deal to school children still wearing their school uniform. We
know an old guy in the street has phoned the cops dozens of times and nothing happens.

Personaly I believe if the individual wants to use the softer stuff thats upto them but when we see school children buying it, and we know its being
reported, and we know nothings being done, then clearly there is no war.

Tell it to the Mexican and Colombian people that there is no "war on drugs", which they find themselves in the middle of.

Basically it is an extremely messy struggle over a commodity hungered for by people around the world and in particular those from the developed world.
Central American & Southern American countries are literally heaving under the direct, structural and embodied violence of this war.

There is clear evidence that the CIA/FBI have been (basically embodiments of government level gangs) involved in drug trafficking in the US/Central &
South America and in South East Asia. This has been exposed by the likes of Gary Webb and is basically common knowledge.

I have yet to see any evidence implicating British banks, security services although you suspect that there has been and continues to be examples of
this.

Anyone have any info on the British connection as cited in this report?

Too many government officials, DEA agents and officials, CIA officials and agents as well as local law enforcement, judges, lawyers, private prison
officials, parole officers, border patrolmen and legislators are making tons of cash under the table with the war on drugs.

[color=#FF0000]In order to stop the war on drugs, we need to declare a war on corruption and greed.

If everybody with any clout in the US CIA wanted to end drug trafficking it could be done but someone in the CIA obviously has a veto vote. There is
this argument that basically states that the drug trade is kind of a Darwinian ethnic cleansing program. If you are a weak willed crackhead you die
or go to prison. Create a democracy made up of weak willed crackheads and you never get any drug enforcement laws passed.

of course the bankers rule the world and they have plenty of shell companies to hide the transactions aka money laundering. The same place the bribe
money goes to so they can't trace any of it. And people wonder why politicians never accomplish anything meaningful.

state capitalism and bilderbergers go hand in hand. free trade(low tariffs) only benefits the multinational big wigs...those that have many shares in
those companies.

Lets call it a "war on people" then, what with the huge amount of deaths, instability in Mexico and Colombia and the incarceration rate in the US and
other countries for users.

Wells Fargo, who took money from TARP, purchased Wachovia, the bank implicated in money laundering for the Mexican & Colombian
Cartelswww.bloomberg.com... is now heavily invested
in the prison for profit industry in the United States,

As Wells Fargo has grown over the years, using its bailout funds to gobble up rival Wachovia and expand to the East Coast, so has the U.S. prison
population. By 2008, one in 100 American adults were either in jail or in prison – and one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34, many
simply for non-violent offenses, justice not so much blind as bigoted.

Overall, more than 2.3 million people are currently behind bars, up 50 percent in the last 15 years, the land of the free now accounting for a full
quarter of the world’s prisoners. These developments are not unrelated. A driving force behind the push for ever-tougher sentences is the for-profit
prison industry, in which Wells Fargo is a major investor. Flush with billions in bailout money and an economic system designed to siphon wealth from
the working class to the idle rich, Wells Fargo has been busy expanding its stake in the GEO Group, the second largest private jailer in America. At
the end of 2011, Wells Fargo was the company’s second-largest investor, holding 4.3 million shares valued at more than $72 million. By March 2012,
its stake had grown to more than 4.4 million shares worth $86.7 million.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only
liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs
profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result

I wonder if drug money (coupled with massive amounts of tax payers money) will help bail out banks again during this current and I suppose
continuation of the 2007-09 crisis.

This was reported back in 2005 on the BBC,

Sir Callum said: "There is increasing evidence that organised criminal groups are placing their own people in financial services firms." "They
can increase their knowledge of firms' systems and controls and thus learn how to circumvent them to commit their frauds."

I found an interesting case on a bank laundering money, involved in the drugs trade etc. Bank of Credit&Commerce International (BCCI). Here are some
excerpts from a journal article about the scandal that BCCI was involved in.

BCCI was established in 1972 with capital from the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed, and the Bank of America

The bank was a mess, financially and lawfully from very early on.

Yet, the bank was insolvent from the 1970s and its top managers had been manipulating the accounts concealing losses, keeping deposits off the
books, hiding illegal BCCI investments in United States financial institutions, and generating false profits. Loans to the Gulf Group of shipping
companies,3 which were larger than BCCI's capital base, were not serviced causing unsustainable costs of over $1 billion in the 1980s. An additional
$1 billion losses were incurred in BCCI's treasury department.

As the liquidators suggested that several billion dollars were unaccounted for and investigations into BCCI's practices intensified and multiplied, an
unparalleled international scandal was fuelled by press reports about BCCI's banking services to money launderers, drug traffickers, arms dealers,
coffee smugglers, tax evaders, political offenders, dictators, and intelligence agencies around the globe.4

However BCCI had influential customers and backers.

It provided banking services, held accounts for, or was publicly associated with, heads or former heads of governments (James Callaghan,7 Willy
Brandt, Alan Garcia of Peru, Jimmy Carter, among many others), intelligence agencies and agents (for example, the CIA, Kamal Adham,8 Richard Helms,
William Casey)9 international organizations (such as the United Nations) and public relations firms (Hill and Knowlton), ambassadors (for example,
Andrew Young, Sergio da Costa of Brazil), highlevel politicians (for example, United States Senator Orrin Hatch, former Senator John Culver - five
British Tories, including Sir Julian Ridsdale, were BCCI consultants),10 and influential business people and bankers (including Larry Romrell, Bob
Magness - founder of TCI, the largest United States cable company - David Paul, Jackson Stephens, Alfred Hartmann, Yves Lamarche).

The lawyers and lobbyists that represented BCCI in the United States of America included former Federal Reserve officials, federal prosecutors, and
former high-level military officers, senators or government officials, including Clark Clifford, the counsel to Democratic Presidents from Truman to
Carter.

In reference to the Iran-Contra scandal, BCCI and Noriega were found to be in business together.

The Kerry investigation into the Noriega-BCCI relationship, did not proceed smoothly. M. Pillsbury, an aid to Republican Senator Hatch was
advising BCCI on lobbying strategya nd on how to deal with Kerry.31A s irdicated by BCCI lawyers' notes, Kerry's interest was not in BCCI by itself:

[According to Pillsbury] Senator Kerry wants to be praised for what he has done on money laundering; especially by conservative Republicans. His only
interest in BCCI is to get info re: Noriega and get credit for his work.

In the face of opposition from various parties including within Kerry's own Committee on Foreign Relations, the section on BCCI was left out of the
final report with only a recommendation of further investigation

BCCI found itself vunerable as many of its shadier customers found themsels overthrown or out of favour.

The Iran-Contra transactions were over and so was the Iran-Iraq war (both sides were secretly, illegally, or against overt foreign policy assisted
by the United States of America, partly through BCCI). In addition, clients of BCCI such as Noriega, Duvalier, Somosa, Saddam Hussein were now
overthrown or demonized by the West and the United States in particular. Ironically, such clients, who would have provided clout and enhanced BCCI's
power in the past because they were allies and friends of the United States, increasingly became sources of weakness and vulnerability.

It seems that BCCI was known for its corrupt practices for some time before anything was done.

Evidence available to the Bank of England and other regulatory agencies could have justified the closure of BCCI much earlier than they did. Yet,
BCCI could not be attacked before the end of the Gulf War. By 1991, however, Iraq was defeated by an alliance that depended heavily on the Arab
support. It would be unlikely for regulatory agencies to engage in actions that could jeopardiset he alliance by embarrassing or antagonizing the
owners of BCCI, the authorities of Abu Dhabi.42 Action that risked damaging the relations with the ruling elites in Abu Dhabi or Saudi Arabia43 -
wealthy and eager backers of anti-communist activities- would have been blocked by foreign policy makers during the Cold or the Gulf Wars. The
Financial Times argued that earlier action against BCCI' would scarcely have pleased the Foreign Office

It is, however, perfectly legal to carry, say, $50,000 embedded in the magnetic stripes of so-called pre-paid stored-value cards. They look like a
credit or debit card but are not linked to a bank account, can in many cases be loaded anonymously, are not “monetary instruments” under U.S. law,
and were labelled “the ideal instrument for large-scale drug trafficking and money-laundering operations” in a 2006 analysis by the National Drug
Intelligence Center. It predicted that drug traffickers, narco-terrorists and other criminals would increasingly rely on stored-value cards —
“superior to established methods of money laundering” — because they could be used without fear of documentation, identification, law
enforcement suspicion or seizure.

In other words, a shot in the arm of the global money laundering industry, an illicit enterprise that accounts for between 2 and 5 percent of the
world’s GDP, according to an estimate by the International Monetary Fund. The Center’s dark warnings did little to curb the rapid growth of the
stored-value card industry — more than $300 billion a year by some estimates.

Unsurprisingly these cards have yet to be regulated.

So if the cards are such a threat, why is there no regulation? It is a question two senators, Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins, asked in a
February 16 letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. The two, respectively the chairman and the ranking member of the Senate’s Committee
on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, last year authored an amendment to close the stored-value card loophole. The amendment became part of
an act on credit card accountability and disclosure President Barack Obama signed into law on May 22 last year.

The amendment stipulated that the Treasury Department work out regulations on the sale, issuance, redemption and international transportation of
stored value cards within 270 days. The deadline lapsed on February 16 and the letter asks for an explanation for the delay in issuing rules. So far,
there has been no reply. It’s not clear whether the delay is due to bureaucratic inertia, overwork in a Treasury Department busy with a deep
financial crisis, or, as money laundering expert Charles Intriago put it, “a manifestation of the unhealthy power of big money, financial
institutions and their lobbyists.”

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